Composers
John Luther Adams and junior Kate Peterson discuss one
of her works-in-progress for a New Music Workshop class.
Photograph by John Seyfried.

THE
CREATION

AT
A PIANO OR IN A PARK, the composer is at work. Sitting in a
studio or standing on the verge of a raging sea, the composer
listens. Like the writer humbled before the whiteness of the
page, the composer waits for what must make itself known as
music.

Consider
for a moment the problem. What the composer has heard as music,
once neatly scored and notated, is handed off to some significant
other. Here, this is what I've given birth to. And whether
it's blues, jazz or music so new it defies a genre, it will
be up to the conductor - or an intrepid ensemble of musicians
- to invigorate and re-create this life's work.

That's
a lot of pressure to put on a relationship.

While
composer John
Luther Adams, associate professor of composition, describes
the initial work on a new piece as "solitary and contemplative,"
he says the completed score doesn't signal the end of the
labor. "I rely on the talent, skill, creativity and generosity
of performing musicians to bring the sounding music into
the air. And the circle isn't finally closed until the music
is received by attentive listeners, with open ears."

Adams'
contemplative music is inspired by Arctic landscapes and
extreme climates, a geography that he has called "the
region between place and culture, between environment and
imagination." For him that region is Alaska, where he has
lived and worked for most of his creative life. But it is
unlikely that most of the conductors and musicians who re-create
his work, well traveled though they might be in the developmental
journeys of musical motifs, have experienced such intense
Northern exposure. For them, Adams' work must present a
unique challenge.

"I'm
not interested in a linear development of musical ideas,
in 'going some

physics:
"I can't help believing that there are dimensions to art
and to life which underlie and embrace all our individual
perceptions and realities."

Asked
whether a definitive performance of his music is possible,
Adams says "I hope not. I want to believe that the music
contains enough substance within it to support many 'definitive'
performances."

When
asked to define a conductor's greatest challenge in approaching
his music, he says, "The best conductors, like the best
artists in any discipline, are those who are dedicated not
to expressing themselves but to serving their art."

TIMOTHY
WEISS, associate professor of wind conducting, has
frequently conducted Adams' work, as well as the work
of many living composers. When he has the rare luxury
of a composer's presence during rehearsal, the best dynamic
occurs, he says, when decisions on interpretation, pacing
and style become collaborative. This is particularly true
when a work is so new that it has never been recorded;
where "the wheel hasn't been invented and there's a built-in
sort of education to draw from," he says.

Last
year Weiss conducted the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble
(CME) in Adams' In the White Silence, a piece he
characterizes as "very new, very unique. I'd never done
anything like that before." And while he says that sometimes
new music can be extremely complex, with layers of notations
and intricacies of detail, Adams' work "is not hard to
understand--what is written on the score is quite apparent."

Still,
with this particular piece, " It would have been very
difficult to figure out exactly what direction I should
take without him there." The rewards of working closely
with Adams--he was present at all but two or three of
twelve rehearsals--gave the process a very authentic feeling,
says Weiss. "There was never any guessing."

Is
there a downside to so much togetherness? Weiss says
that Adams "understands the process of preparing and
rehearsing. He'd have input, but he did it in such a
way that it didn't waste time." This hasn't always been
Weiss' experience. "Time and money are at a premium
when you are rehearsing. Sometimes the rehearsal process
can become bogged down a little bit, with a composer
causing the process to go slower than necessary."

Weiss
and Adams value collaborations that are grounded in mutual
respect, learning and trust. Weiss says that the ideal
collaboration is one where "the conductor or performer
feels perfectly within rights to question a figuration
or to say 'this pattern does not lie well for me,' or
to ask 'why this tempo?'--and for the composer to say
'I don't like the way this is going. Can we try this instead?'
"

THE
PERFORMANCE

WITH
SO MANY HANDS INVOLVED, especially the one holding the
baton, how much of a performed piece is actually shaped
by the conductor's vision?

"Paradoxically,"
says Adams, "It's conductors who add the least by way
of 'interpretation' who most powerfully shape a new
piece of music."

Weiss
adds, "Performers and conductors have a tremendous impact
on the way a performance is done. And if not, then why
do it? If we didn't we would simply be artisans, and
not artists."

Weiss
considers himself a performer, again, a nod to the collaborative
aspect of these huge endeavors. "In some scores," he
says, "There's so much instruction or information through
the notation that you wonder how much you're affecting
the piece. Ultimately the score does not make any noise;
it's only a set of instructions for how to make the
sound. The pacing of the piece, its balance, the way
articulations are made and the way phrases are pulled
and released ultimately are up to the discretion of
the performer."

Adams
calls himself "a recovering perfectionist," wanting
the work to be as perfect as possible. But over the
years he's come to understand that "wholeness is better
than perfection."

"With
someone else conducting my music," he says, "I used to
be all over the

place,
offering a lot of backseat driving advice. But the
more experience I gain, and the more I have the opportunity
to work with outstanding conductors and instrumentalists,
the more I try to stay out of the way and let the
musicians do their work."

Student
composer kate
peterson, who prefers the lowercase spelling,
had, at the time she was interviewed for this article,
been Adams' student "for a little under 12 hours."
She says Adams is the first person to ever really
critique and evaluate her work outside of a classroom
setting.

Hearing
her music live "is possibly the most critical part of
my compositional process, because I can evaluate whether
or not what I was trying to accomplish was successful."
She tries to get every piece she's written performed.
For her, perfection--unlike Adams' quest for wholeness--has
been hearing "how I would exactly perform the piece.
Last year I felt it was very important for me to begin
to let go of some of that control, realizing that I
would
not be able to stand over every performer who would
ever play my pieces."

Once
she reached that decision, she began to include non-traditional
notation schemes in her compositions--"graphic scores,
scores with a few bars of music and a lot of text instructions
as interpretive guidelines. It was very freeing."

This
sort of thing is not uncommon. Weiss recalls past
collaborations with professor of composition and music
theory Randy Coleman, who, he says, likes to compose
performer freedom into a work. "Coleman would argue
that music in this century has become so over-notated
that a lot of performance freedom has been lost. His
reaction is to mandate it by forcing people to make
decisions"--indicating, for example, that improvisation
must occur in a particular section.

Adams,
when asked if his work allows for any improvisation
or freedom of interpretation, replies: "Improvisation
is a demanding discipline. My work is concerned with
a different, more formalist kind of discipline."

Peterson
says that although she writes in several different
veins, she doubts that her music has ever truly needed
a conductor, though it has required "a clock, sometimes."
Lately, more of her work is "performer oriented--written
with some guidelines but lending itself to improvisation.
I like the art of improvisation because I am not trained
in jazz at all, and jazz is really one of the only
mainstream improvisational strains of music."

Indeed.
So where does this leave the composer/conductor relationship
in jazz? Or the blues?

Michael
Mossman '82,

THE
ARRANGEMENT

WHAT
JAZZ WANTS TO BE IS OFTEN determined by which arrangement
among many might be played at any given moment by
any given ensemble.

Michael
Philip Mossman '82, director of jazz studies at
the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College,
talks of the "blurry, gray line" between original
compositions
and commissions of arrangements. His music-writing
life is fairly divided between the two.

"When
you get into arranging, a lot of times what you're
really dealing with is composing. Arranging is a
transformation . . . where you rediscover the tune
altogether. Often, we begin with the tune and completely
change the intent. This gets into more of a compositional
kind of treatment, rather than just an orchestral
treatment."

Mossman
continues, "The problem with jazz is if you play
the same arrangements over and over again, you can
preserve the sound but not the intent, which is
transformational. Jazz music was never meant to
be static, or totally archival. In jazz, we count
on the piece being transformed every time it's performed."

As
a composer, Mossman says that "most of the time"
other performers have achieved the essence of what
he's created, "but the most pleasant of these times
are when I'm surprised. Once I hear that the written
part is performed well and accurately, then the
next thing I'm looking for is the surprise: what
the musicians add."

That
said, Mossman does believe that an essential quality
runs through his work. When asked to define it,
though, he can't get away from jazz's communal nature.
Nor does he try. Influence and inspiration --tradition
-- inform the sensibility of jazz. "In working
with players such as Dizzy Gillespie and Horace
Silver and Mario Bauza, I learned some things about
intent," he says. "These are three people whose
writing I respect a great deal, whose sense of music
I respect. I also have to credit my former teacher
Wendell Logan. He's so much a part of who I am as
a composer. He taught me that if you're going to
write music, there's a deep tradition of writing
notes that have something to say . . . a tradition
of composition requiring thought and craft. Counterpoint,
for example, the development and transformation
of ideas, the inclusion of ideas from the jazz tradition
presented in new ways. . . ."

Wendell
Logan

THE
IMPROVISATION

IMPROVISATION
IS A PRIMARY aspect of composer Wendell
Logan's work, who calls jazz and blues "some
of the most heraldic music there is. . . .The
blues is a way of looking at the world and a way
of reacting to the world," he says. "And the blues
is about many things, but it's about making a
way when there seemingly isn't a way. It's about
improvising."

Logan
is chair of Oberlin's jazz studies program and
professor of African-American music. Asked whether,
given jazz's improvisational nature, it can be
conducted, he laughs and says "Not well. A good
conductor--if there is such a thing in jazz--is
a person who gets up there, gives a downbeat,
gives the cutoff or whatever, and gets out of
the way. Anybody else is out there for show."

Logan's
composed works cross genres; his work is influenced
not only by blues and jazz and other music from
the African-American experience but also by opera
and poetry. Consequently, his works have often
required a conductor at the helm. Occasionally,
he fills that role himself, but sometimes, he
says, he favors the experience of listening over
the experience of conducting. He says his main
concern, once he has let go of a piece, is that
the person conducting it will "have the opportunity
to spend the amount of time necessary to realize
his vision."

Still,
because a lot of what he does employs,
as he says, "various devices of indeterminacy,
various notational devices that try to capture
some of the freedom of jazz," this means that
a group of performers might be able to capture
some of his nuances, and another group might not,
perhaps "because they are not really conversant
in improvisation and in the language of African-American
music." So Logan doubts there can be such a thing
as a definitive performance of his work.

"They
can give a satisfactory performance, but it not
might not reach the

mark.
But that's okay. It's written in such a way
that that's all acceptable. They looked at it
and this is the way they saw it."

Marci
Janas '91, a staff writer in the Office of College
Relations, is also a poet whose work as an Oberlin
student was recognized by the Academy of American
Poets. She has won prizes in competitions sponsored
by The Abiko Quarterly (Japan), the University
of Alaska, Southeast, and Ohio Writer, and her
poems have appeared in Field, Synaesthetic and
The Abiko Quarterly.